Snide remarks and sexual innuendo

Does anyone benefit from it all?

By Donna Nebenzahl, The GazetteSeptember 24, 2009

The news is out: a vast majority of women don't like sexual banter in the workplace, while half the men have no problem with it.

Duh.

Those little asides about your outfit or innuendos about something you said, a veiled reference to sexy starlets, girlfriends or sexual performance - all done in jest, of course, described as "just a joke." And hey, why are you taking this the wrong way, anyway? What's your problem?

It seems that 90 per cent of the females, who made up two-thirds of a survey of 1,300 employees published in January in the Journal of Applied Psychology, didn't much like any of this behaviour.

And this is not just "good fun." Researchers Jennifer Berdahl of the Rotman School at the University of Toronto and Karl Aquino of the Sauder School of Management at the University of British Columbia discovered that even the 25 per cent of employees who claimed to find the sexual banter "fun and flattering" derived no rewards from it.

"We expected that people who enjoy these acts would derive some benefits from them," Berdahl said.

It turned out that everyone who was subject to the behaviour exhibited more signs of work withdrawal, felt less valued, consumed more alcohol and reported more symptoms of depression than employees who never experienced it.

Even the men who claimed to enjoy it more derived no improvement in their psychological well being at work.

Why, the researchers wondered?

Could it be that this sort of behaviour has an insidious effect on self-image and self-esteem?

Is it possible that those very complaints made by so-called "feminists" (always derisively described) exist in a research model?

Absolutely.

And there's more.

Berdahl has put her finger on that nebulous negativity that results from using the state of femaleness as fodder for jokes and innuendo.

"Research in our culture has shown that such sexual behaviour connotes domination and subordinance," she said. "Therefore, the effects can be negative, even if the person is not conscious of it."

The other piece of this, of course, is that the need for domination and subordination emanates from those individuals who want to control the agenda. That's the reason why many men are intimidated by smart women, some researchers posit.

Not only that, a study published in 2006 in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour argues that men shy away from long-term relationships with funny women because "men see being funny as a male thing."

So Rod Martin, author of the study, told the British newspaper, The Independent. After interviewing hundreds of men and women in their 20s, he concluded that 50 per cent of the men didn't want a partner with a sense of humour.

As one British comedian noted: "Women see men with a sense of humour as dangerous and sexy, while men see it as threatening.

"Basically, what it comes down to is that humour is a mark of intelligence."

So while all this is going on, are we taking this stuff seriously, looking for ways to bring equality and mutual respect to all those places they ought to exist?

Not if the press has its way. Not only have women with any iota of stridency (read, argumentativeness) around workplace and gender issues been described as "hysterical" and "nutcases" for decades now, the press continues to wrap those stories in fuzzy, women-only areas.

Take a recent New York Times article on all the advice given to women about ideal corporate conduct. As Tracy Clark-Flory reported in salon.com, "as happens too often with the Times' women-related writing, it was tucked away in the Fashion & Style section alongside pieces about $1,000 handbags and how trousers are the new jeans."

Nothing new here, Clark-Flory points out. But it's no wonder that all this research and advice is rarely acted upon by companies, she writes. Maybe they would take it more seriously, "if pieces about women in business were published in the Business section."

And maybe it all starts with us, working women, taking ourselves more seriously as well.